United States President Joe Biden said on Tuesday that climate change is “everybody’s crisis” while touring the eastern seaboard of the country that took significant damage from the aftermath of Hurricane Ida, according to US media reports.

Before giving the address on Tuesday, Biden toured the streets of New York’s Queens and New Jersey and met the people whose residences were damaged by the hurricane, which caused more than a dozen deaths in the area.

“The threat is here. It is not getting any better,” Biden said in New York. “The question is can it get worse. We can stop it from getting worse”, according to reports from Associated Press.

Biden said that the threats introduced by natural disasters like tornadoes, wildfires, flooding, hurricanes and storms should be handled by the people of the country in a manner that it will mitigate climate change.

“We can’t turn it back very much, but we can prevent it from getting worse,” he said. Biden added that scientists have been warning for decades that this day would come and that urgent action was needed, according to reports from Associated Press.

The aftermath of Hurricane Ida killed at least 50 people in six states on the eastern seaboard of the United States. The record-breaking rainfall, which was triggered due to the hurricane, overwhelmed the sewer and river systems of the states and resulted in the flooding of streets and subway systems. Several tornadoes were also spawned as part of Ida’s aftermath.

Biden has approved major disaster declarations, making federal aid available for people in six New Jersey counties and five New York counties affected by the devastating floods.

He is open to applying the declaration to other storm-ravaged New Jersey counties, White House spokesperson Jen Psaki said, according to reports from Associated Press.

(With AP inputs)